What We Leave Behind

What We Leave Behind is a piercing, impassioned guide to living a truly responsible life on earth. Human waste, once considered a gift to the soil, has become toxic material that has broken the essential cycle of decay and regeneration. Here, award-winning author Derrick Jensen and activist Aric McBay weave historical analysis and devastatingly beautiful prose to remind us that life—human and nonhuman—will not go on unless we do everything we can to facilitate the most basic process on earth, the root of sustainability: one being’s waste must always become another being’s food.

 

Listen to a short audio excerpt of the chapter “Legacy”. (2 MB mp3)

Contents and Excerpts

• Preface

Part I

• Decay
• Fascinated by Decay (p 3)
• Waste
• Stories Told by Trash (p 17)
• Garbage
• Long History of Garbage (p 26)
• Burned Tomatoes (p 34)
• Rag Recycling (p 46)
• Tijuana Dump (p 49)
• Sustainability
• Sustainability Needs Context (p 55)
• SustainabilityTM
• William McDonough (p 61)
• Horizontal Hostility (p 76)
• Compartmentalization and its Opposite
• Compartmentalization (p 81)
• Linear Thinking (p 85)
• Compartmentalized Thinking (p 88)
• Plastic
• Modern Invention of Waste (p 99)
• Immortality (p 107)
• Plastic Is Everywhere (p 108)
• Which Poison? (p 114)
• Mining
• Mining Chemical Separation (p 120)
• Medicine
• Toxic Gifts
• Embalming (p 139)
• Bodies
• After Us, the Deluge (p 147)

Part II

• Morality
• Ed Schultz (p 163)
• Taking it Personally
• Morality Revisited
• Internal Morality (p 185)
• Legacy
• World Better Because You Were Born? (p 192)
• The Real World
• Diversions (p 199)
• Insane Solutions (p 201)
• Real World Is Primary (p 203)
• Taking it Personally, Volume II
• The Damage Isn’t Damage (p 211)
• Magical Thinking
• Are You a Magical Thinker? (p 224)
• Great Butterfly (p 229)
• Baring Witness (p 232)
• Complexity
• Arthur C. Clarke (p 241)
• Despair
• Gordian Knot (p 254)
• Powerlessness
• Five Problems With Simple Living (p 257)
• Infantile Relationships (p 261)
• Servile and Infantile (p 262)
• Growing Up
• Childish Things (p 270)
• Survivalism Isn’t Enough (p 276)

Part III

• The Future: Business As Usual
• United States’ Garbage (p 292)
• A Boeing 747 of Trash (p 292)
• Technotopia
• Recycling Depleted Uranium (p 314)
• Oxygen Catastrophe (p 320)
• Technotopia: Producing Waste
• Kotex (p 329)
• Manufacturing Consumers (p 331)
• Technotopia: Industry
• Technics (p 342)
• Computronium (p 354)
• Collapse
• Historical Collapses (p 365)
• Collapse of Rome (p 374)
• Fighting Back
• The Living

Reviews

July 2013, from Bituadiat
December 2010, by Rosebud Magazine
May 2009, by Jeremy Garber

Translations

• Français
  • Du « développement durable » au capitalisme vert (p 61)
  • Le monde réel (p 199)